Substation Fabrication

Fort Hills Mine

Located in Alberta's Athabasca region, the Fort Hills project focuses on oil sands mining. The project is expected to be completed in its entirety by 2017, using the latest technologies and approaches to operations. The objective of the project is to eventually produce a capacity of 180,000 barrels per day within a twelve-month period.

REV was given a fantastic opportunity to create eleven 72kV-15kV mining substations for the Fort Hills mining project, specifically for their shovels and various mining applications. The original plan for this project was to use metal enclosed switchgear, however, at award stage the decision was made to switch to arc resistant switchgear as an improvement on safety. When it was realized that this would not be a conventional cable feed to shovels, it became REV's challenge to come up with a unique design.

REV's engineering department came up with the design for the eleven mining substations. As timing was an essential component to the completion of the project on time, and due to the size of the mobile substations, a plan was put into action to have four substations in various stages at a time. This was done in order to have a fully functional and tested substation ship out every month. Each substation was complete with a REV designed crank up alarm status which allowed for ground level work without the need for scaffolding. The substations were each manufactured with the utmost precision and care throughout the entirety of the work.

The project from start to finish was completed in a time span of two years, from the time when the project was awarded to the final shipment. The major challenge to this project was predominantly scheduling, as there were many components to the process that needed to be coordinated. However, despite this challenge the overall outcome of the project was a major success. We were able to meet all of the customer requirements by each of the scheduled delivery dates. The feedback from the customer expressed nothing but positivity and praise for the hard work of all those involved. With such a grand project, we are very pleased with the persistence from all those who worked so hard on it and we look forward to building such highly talked about products in the near future.